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Saturday, June 13, 2009

Another hate murder
Posted by Jill | 6:21 PM
*Sigh*

Think back to all the ranting that Tom Tancredo and other Republicans and Lou Dobbs have done about immigration. Think of how they've been whipping people into a frenzy about marauding hordes from the south.

Now try to tell me that kind of talk does not lead to this:
An outspoken anti-immigration activist from Everett has been arrested in Arizona in connection to a deadly home invasion robbery.

Shawna Forde, the executive director of the Minutemen American Defense, is one of three accused in the shooting deaths of 29-year-old Raul Flores and his daughter, 9-year-old Brisenia Flores, at their home in Arivaca, Ariz., a town 10 miles north of the Mexican border.

Two others - 34-year-old Jason Bush and 42-year-old Albert Gaxiola - were arrested. All three have been charged with two counts of first-degree murder, one count of first-degree burglary and one count of aggravated assault.

According to the Pima County Sheriff's Office, two men and a woman posing as police officers forced their way into the Flores ' home in the middle of the night on May 30.

It is not known exactly what transpired next, but Raul Flores and his daughter were shot and killed. The girl's mother was wounded and is recovering in a local hospital, deputies said.

Investigators believe the killings were premeditated by thieves looking for drugs and money.

On Thursday a tip led detectives to Bush, who was in a hospital in the Kingman area receiving treatment for wounds he allegedly sustained during the robbery.

On Friday deputies arrested Forde and Gaxiola in Sierra Vista and Tucson, respectively.

Investigators believe Forde masterminded the home invasion robbery, which Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik described as "evil" and "heinous."

"It was a planned home invasion where the plan was to kill all the people inside this trailer so there would be no witnesses," he said. "This is perhaps the most despicable crime that any of us in this organization has ever been associated with."

Moments after her arrest, Forde turned to news cameras and denied involvement in the deadly robbery with the words "No, I didn't."

But the sheriff described the woman as a dangerous, unstable person.

"If you look at her history closely and you know what we know, she's, at best, a psychopath," Dupnik said.

The mission of Forde's group is to secure U.S. borders and coastal boundaries from unlawful entry, as well as to "increase the awareness of the devastation caused by illegal immigration to our state and country," according to the group's Web site.

MAD sends volunteers to the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona for the purpose of "gathering exclusive footage of drug cartel drug smuggling and humane trafficking (sic)," Forde wrote on the site.

When you have people abusing the public airwaves to spout crap like this, and you tell lunatics with guns to "take their country back", people get killed. In this case, one of them was a 9-year-old child.

More about Shawna Forde from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

So how high will the body count go before the hatemongers and bigots admit their role in fanning these flames? And no, these are not isolated cases. I've linked to the terrific work Sara Robinson has been doing on the eliminationist movement in the last few days, but it's worth going back to look at what she wrote back in April, when the DHS report that was so derided by conservatives, came out:
The far right wing has been laying the groundwork for violent action for decades. Long before they turn dangerous, political and religious groups take their first step down that road by adopting a worldview that justifies eventual violent action. The particulars of the narrative vary, but the basic themes are always the same. First: their story is apocalyptic, insisting that the end of the world as we've known it is near. Second: it divides the world into a Good-versus-Evil/Us-versus-Them dualism that encourages the group to interpret even small personal, social, or political events as major battles in a Great Cosmic Struggle -- a habit of mind that leads the group to demonize anyone who disagrees with them. This struggle also encourages members to invest everyday events with huge existential meaning, and as a result sometimes overreact wildly to very mundane stuff.

Third: this split allows for a major retreat from consensus reality and the mainstream culture. The group rejects the idea that it shares a common future with the rest of society, and curls up into its own insular worldview that's impervious to the outside culture's reasoning or facts. Fourth: insiders feel like they're a persecuted, prophetic elite who are being opposed by wicked, tyrannical forces. Left to fester, this paranoia will eventually drive the group to make concrete preparations for self-defense -- and perhaps go on the offense against their perceived persecutors. Fifth: communities following this logic will also advocate the elimination of their enemies by any means necessary, in order to purify the world for their ideology.

All these ideas have been part of the discourse on the right for decades. You can trace their genesis all the way back to the 1950s, starting with the overheated apocalypticism of the anti-Communist movement. Over time, it came to include the dualism of the John Birch Society and assorted white supremacist groups; the persecution complex of Nixon and his Silent Majority followers; the anti-liberal eliminationism that's been gathering force for the past decade; and the war on evidence-based science and reason that's always been at the heart of conservative arguments. As J. Peter Scoblic argues in Us vs. Them, narratives that justify violence have always been deeply ingrained in the right-wing belief system.

Since the Inauguration, all of these themes are being played far more loudly and openly. And somewhere between November 4 and this 100th day, the right wing has also begun to act on these beliefs in ways that push the whole process to the next level -- the level where thoughts and beliefs begin to crystallize into action.


And here we are. Now the question is whether these people and the groups with which they affiliate are going to be treated as the terrorists they are, or if the Obama Justice Department is going to take some time out from throwing the gays under the bus and look at the domestic terrorism that is happening right here, right now. On a recent Real Time with Bill Maher, Botox Blonde and Bush Apologist Fran Townsend tried to draw parallels between PETA, Greenpeace and guys like the murderers of George Tiller, Stephen Johns, and others. Maher dropped the ball on this, omitting the reality that however misguided the efforts of PETA and Earth Liberation Front and other such groups may be, their primary objective isn't killing people, and these groups are not embraced by the Democratic Party the way the Minutemen, with which Shawna Forde is associated and Operation Rescue, with which Scott Roeder is affilated, is embraced by the Republican Party.

Sorry, but Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage and Michael Reagan and Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity and Dick Cheney and Tom Tancredo and Jeff Sessions and John Boehner and the entire Republican Party owns these people. They own them lock, stock and barrel. When you hold a mirror up to the Republican rhetoric about race and women and minorities for the last thirty years, ever since their patron Saint Ronald Reagan took office, it's the faces of Shawna Forde, James W. Van Brunn, and Scott Roeder that look back at them.

And damn it if they don't like what they see.

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1 Comments:
Blogger Unknown said...
How high will the body count of Americans be because of the actions of illegal aliens?
6/15/09, 2:59 PM  
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